Daydreamer
Comparable to Fluid Radio’s own Margins – Fragile Existence released recently, Camus and Time Released Sound offer up a smorgasbord of fleeting yet fantastical ambient work with “Daydreamer”. More organically multi-tiered in instrument usage, Camus opens with fingerpicked guitar and bubbling bass ostinato. The track gradually morphs in texture and temperament and is accentuated by volume dips and peaks – the creator knows how to make use of the headroom. It’s perplexing in effect as the timbres wash towards a rocky creek but decelerate into an ambient prelude, befitting the nature of the rest of the work on this record.
The second and third pieces, “Cloud Castles” and “Immortal” are stylistically similar through trumpet and voice to French Entropy artist Hutch Demoulipied, featured in The Wire magazine in February 2012 on the clutch of her “Otherness” 2CD. But do compare Camus any more and the individuality of the music doesn’t dissolve, rather it becomes greater in its lifting from the parallels of the well. The airy nature of the sound sourcing never threatens to envelope the paucity of the listener’s horizon. Guitar chords don’t become restrained to just chords, instead working as assemblages of melody that punctuate the content. On “Immortal”, too, beats pervade the soundscapes, and they crisp up the focus of the instruments to act as less wafty, discrete entities.
The main strength of “Daydreamer”, though, is its tendency to absolve from strict rules as to where each sound should go next in critical infrastructure. Things are seen to not matter; flights of fancy return to whispers from the past. This gives the music and the maker’s mind ability to deviate from concentric structure altogether. In a long album that goes over an hour, that ultimately feels longer than it is however, Camus displays an extremely talented way with his tools: guitar, trumpet, drum machine and analogue synthesiser, like they are being crafted into diamond nitrate and fed into the veins. A moving LP and a verifiably superb addition to any ambient fan’s collection coming from Time Released Sound.